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You know the feeling. Friend posts something on Facebook, links to an article or post or a poem or photo on Twitter. A relative or co-worker sends you an email and there’s a note: “Nails it.” “Hits it out of the park.” “The writer is on fire.” “This is beautiful.” “This made me think.” “Read this and immediately thought of you!”

If you’ve gotten enough of these you click on the link with dread. Because you know. You’ll open it up, read whatever it is, and think, “What the---?”

You can’t believe your friend thought this was a home run. Can’t believe your brother thought you’d like this. Nails it? The hammer didn’t even touch the board! Beautiful? If the trite, trivial, clichéd, incoherent, corny, and just plain dumb can be called beautiful. Thought of me? That’s what you think of me?

What were they thinking? What’s wrong with them?

What’s wrong with them is that they read it in a mood you’re not in, while thinking about things that haven’t crossed your mind, without having read any of the sixteen articles you just read. They read it and applied it to situations you haven’t lived through. They read it remembering events you weren’t there for, seeing it in light of experiences you did not share.

What’s wrong with them is they read it without being you.

Maybe a better question is What’s wrong with you?

And the answer is you read it without being them, without taking their thoughts, their situations, their feelings into account.

Or you’re right. It is complete nonsense. All those things combined to cause them to misread it, miss the writer’s actual point, overlook obvious flaws in logic or style. Maybe they just had a momentary and forgivable lapse in judgment or taste.

It was farther into the local countryside than Lara had ever been. On the way back he drove a country road, partly unpaved, that ran through Harrison County’s scrubby hills and sunken meadows. The days was sunny, snowy and bright.

“My God,” she said. “It’s so desolate. Desolate, desolate. So far from anywhere.”

“You’re in Flyoverland, my dear.”

“In what?”

“You’ve never heard the middle of the country called that? Flyoverland. That’s what they call our little corner of nothing much. On the coasts.” He shifted down as they approached dirt. It was a shame to muddy the car. “At least,” he said, “that’s what they tell me. No one ever called it that to me.”

She laughed. “Flyoverland. And what would you have done if someone had called it that to you?”

Tom Wilkinson as President Lyndon Baines Johnson and David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King Jr in Selma. The scenes with Johnson are some of the weakest a generally fine movie, badly written, perfunctorily staged, and, on Wilkinson’s part, unconvincingly played. Click on the photo to see how much more interesting and dramatic looking the reality was.

As I was saying Saturday, David Oyelowo didn’t have the same advantages playing Martin Luther King in Selma that Daniel Day-Lewis had playing Abraham Lincoln in Lincoln. In particular, for several reasons, Day-Lewis was given a better script. But he also had a stronger supporting cast. Oyelowo didn’t have a second male lead, a female lead, or a true supporting actor to work with and against. There is no equal to him in talent and no equal or near-equal to his character in terms of dramatic effect or historical importance, which seems like a strange thing to say about a movie that includes Lyndon Baines Johnson as a major character. But that’s the point. Selma’s LBJ is a weak character. I don’t mean that Johnson is shown to be a weak person. I mean Tom Wilkinson’s performance is weak. There’ve been complaints that the movie gets the historical President Johnson wrong. It does and it doesn’t. Wilkinson gets the human being Lyndon wrong and that results in the impression that the history’s all wrong.

Let me start by saying this doesn’t make Selma anything less than an effective and affecting movie. I’m not bothered by the historical inaccuracies, most of which are minor by the standards of Hollywood historical dramas and defensible cases of poetic license. Johnson’s place in history and reputation will take care of themselves, Maureen Dowd’s fretting and Joseph Califano’s indignation notwithstanding. I was bothered more while I was watching the movie and obviously still am in thinking about it since by the artistic and dramatic weaknesses caused by Oyelowo’s being left by his screenwriter, his director, and his castmates to carry too much of the story along on his own.

There are movies that work as essentially one-person shows. A main point of those movies is watching the lead actor deliver what amounts to an extended soliloquy. (Because movies are visual mediums, actors can soliloquize without saying a word.) Wild is that kind of movie and Reese Witherspoon delivers that sort of extended visual soliloquy beautifully. But Wild is the story of what’s going on in a single individual’s heart and head. I thought what was wrong with The Imitation Game was it treated World War II as Alan Turing’s personal problem and left Benedict Cumberbatch alone too often to soliloquize visually and verbally, the result being way too much Cumberbatch. (I know. I know. As if there could be such a thing as too much Cumberbatch.) This isn’t what happens toSelma. But it happens too often withinSelma. And it’s more the case that instead of there being too much David Oyelowo, there’s not enough anybody else. Oyelowo is often trying to interact with actors who just aren’t there in the way he needs them to be. This is mainly due to poor writing---those actors’ parts are underwritten, even hardly written---but it’s also due, at least in one case, to egregious miscasting.

One of the measures of an actor’s performance is the effect he (and his character) have on other actors (and their characters). Good acting is interacting. Characters are defined by their reactions as much as or more than by their actions. So what does a good actor do when he doesn’t have enough to react to in a given scene? He can try too hard to overcompensate---that is, ham it up---or he can muddle through and hope things will get better in the next scene. Wisely, Oyelowo muddles through those scenes. But the effect of his performance is weakened because of that.

Daniel Day-Lewis didn’t have that problem in Lincoln. He was never left on his own to muddle through.

He had a superb supporting cast given brilliantly written characters to play. Just for starters: he had Sally Field and his Lincoln had Mary Todd Lincoln. He had the undersung David Strathairn’s brilliant William Seward. Most advantageous of all he had Tommy Lee Jones chewing up the scenery all around him and gobbling up other actors for dessert.

Together the three of them combine to help define Day-Lewis’ Lincoln by limiting his performance, counter-balancing it, and placing it into a broader and deeper dramatic context. Their performances are as much a part of Day-Lewis’ as his make-up, speech inflections, and beat-up carpet slippers.

Carmen Ejogo is excellent in Selma but she has the same problem playing Coretta Scott King as Oyelowo had playing Martin and screenwriter Paul Webb had the same problem writing her part as he had writing Oyelowo’s: a public memory that had to be carefully respected. And historical fact was a problem. Coretta King just wasn’t on the scene for most of the events depicted in the film and she wasn’t much involved in the day to day happenings even to the degree she could have been from a distance if her husband had allowed it. That he kept her at a distance, geographically and emotionally, was a source of friction in the marriage but because she wasn’t on the spot that friction could not made as big a part of the story as the frictions in the Lincolns’ marriage could be in Lincoln. Mary Lincoln would have been involved in the daily life of the President during that time frame. We don’t know how much she was involved but we know she would have involved herself more than necessary and more than Lincoln would have liked and we can be pretty sure how she’d have done it. She was a difficult personality and the ways she was difficult are well-documented. And she was self-dramatizing. Coretta Scott King was self-effacing. She kept herself in check. Mary Lincoln never did that. This makes her easier to write and easier to play or at any rate easier to figure out how to play.

David Strathairn’s William Seward is a problem for himself, that is Seward has to solve the problem of being William Seward working for Abraham Lincoln: he’s a rival who might have been President himself and who has to remind himself that, talented as he is himself, the better man won. That doesn’t make him deferential. Seward challenges Lincoln and forces him to explain himself. He’s Lincoln’s foil. But that’s in the script. What Strathairn does is make us see that Seward needs to know what Lincoln’s thinking so he knows what to do. He lets us see Seward thinking, working his way through a problem, doubting, making up his mind, and deciding or postponing a decision. He turns the dialogs between Lincoln and Seward into conversation so that Day-Lewis seems to be explaining himself to him and not just talking for the audience’s benefit. Then, just as important, he provides the warmth of real affection. Lincoln and Seward come across as good friends not just through the intensity of Strathairn’s focus on Day-Lewis but also because of the way Strathairn makes Day-Lewis focus on him.

The character in Selma who might have been used as Lincoln uses Seward, Colman Domingo’s Ralph Abernathy is inexplicably underwritten, leaving Domingo little to do but look supportive. André Holland’s Andrew Young is even more underwritten and underused. Wendell Pierce as Hosea Williams, on his own, without help from the script, brings a stronger presence to the screen than either Domingo or Holland but he’s more often seen apart from King and his best scene is with the very fine Stephen James as the very young John Lewis whose own scenes with King are pure exposition with little dramatic intensity. The closest Oyelowo has to a real foil is the relatively minor character James Forman, played by the talented, visually compelling, and quite possibly destined for stardom Trai Byers who looks like a young Dwayne Johnson who can truly act.

Then there’s Tommy Lee Jones.

Day-Lewis is able to take his Lincoln to the point of caricature because Jones is there blasting apart the very notion of caricature. His Thaddeus Stevens is a man who happily, gleefully, energetically, and triumphantly caricatures himself. This is something the real Abraham Lincoln did himself. It’s something successful charismatic politicians and leaders do and have always done. Martin Luther King did it. Almost by himself Jones creates within Lincoln a world where that makes sense because it works. In the process, he makes Day-Lewis’s Lincoln’s self-caricaturing look subtle.

The character who could have and should have done that in Selma is of course Lyndon Johnson.

Tom Wilkinson, a fine actor, is wrong for the part to begin with but then he takes an entirely wrong approach to the part. He doesn’t play Johnson as the brilliant but somewhat mad self-caricaturist he was. Which means he doesn’t play him realistically. He doesn’t play Johnson at all. He plays a man named Lyndon Johnson with some of Johnson’s attributes but none of his fire and little of his essential madness who happens to have been President of the Untied States in 1965 instead of the LBJ we know from history. He doesn’t even seem to be trying to suggest the real Lyndon Johnson. The accent is wrong. The timbre of his voice, his inflections, the rhythms of his speech are all Wilkinson’s inventions. He doesn’t even swear convincingly. It doesn’t help that the dialog’s terrible. Webb hasn’t written a line for him that sounds like it might have come out of LBJ’s mouth. But Wilkinson doesn’t capture Johnson’s mannerisms, expressions, or body language either. Wilkinson doesn’t look like Lyndon Johnson, but an actor doesn’t have to look like someone to look like that someone. Bill Murray doesn’t really look much like Franklin Roosevelt but he captured the spirit of FDR. There’s little I saw of the spirit of LBJ in Wilkinson’s Johnson. In fact, I saw more of what Tom Watson saw. The spirit of Richard Nixon.

At times I wondered if Wilkinson, who is British, had researched the wrong American President.

Mostly it was in the hunched-shouldered, chin-tucked in, defensive posture Wilkinson adopted. Johnson was one of our two tallest Presidents, as tall as Lincoln, six feet four, taller than George Washington and Thomas Jefferson (Quick: who were the next three the tallest, all six-two?), and he used his height and his heft to intimidate people. Weirdly, Wilkinson, who is a pretty big guy, six foot one, often looks as though he’s trying to make himself appear shorter.

And because Wilkinson’s Johnson isn’t as powerful or passionate a personality as the real LBJ, he doesn’t come across as the powerful and passionate champion of Civil Rights that the real LBJ was.

I think the critical indignation at the way Selma portrays Johnson boils down to the charge that it shows him to be a reluctant supporter of Civil Rights. It doesn’t. It portrays him as a reluctant supporter of the Voting Rights Act or, rather, of trying to get it passed at that particular point in his administration. This wasn’t true, exactly. The Voting Rights Act, however, was only one of Johnson’s legislative priorities at the time and he did have to make politically expedient calculations in order to advance his agenda. Selma shows that although with perhaps too much emphasis. But it also portrays Johnson as opposed to the march from Selma to Montgomery, for personal and politically expedient reasons, and that’s not true. Still, what is true is that white liberal politicians were often too cautious and too slow to get behind things Civil Rights leaders like King were trying to do and they weren’t enthusiastic about letting the movement set its own goals and decide its own strategies and devise its own tactics. This was true of Eisenhower and Kennedy, maybe a little less true of Johnson but only because things had come so far by the time he became President. So I didn’t feel as though Johnson was being maligned by Selma on this score so much as used to make a valid point. I think that if he’d been portrayed as a personality more like he really was, it would have been easier to let this pass. Anyway, in the end he’s given his historical due.

The movie also portrays him as feeling ambivalent about Martin Luther King both as a person and as a political ally. This strikes me as very true. Johnson was an egomaniac. He did not like it when anyone challenged him on anything. And he was reflexively, intrinsically manipulative, conniving, opportunistic, and bullying. King did not let himself be manipulated or become any politician’s opportunity and he would not be bullied. So of course he frustrated and infuriated and even confused Johnson from time to time and it would have been natural for some of Johnson’s frustration with King to spill over into frustration with the whole movement. Riled up, I’m sure he sometimes sounded as if he wished King would go to hell and take the problem of Civil Rights with him. The problem in Selma is that Wilkinson’s Johnson doesn’t sound as angry as the real Johnson would have nor is he nearly as creative in his anger. Like I said, he doesn’t swear convincingly.

The real libel of Johnson comes in a scene in which Johnson conspires with J. Edgar Hoover to blackmail King into cancelling the march.

That didn’t happen.

At least, I don’t believe it did. Have to be careful. A tape might turn up tomorrow proving it did. But for now as far as I know there is no evidence that it did and, even speculatively, there’s no good reason to think that it did.

And, again, I’m more bothered by the artistic mistake here than any historical fabricating because the fabrication is forced by the mistake, which was to include Hoover in the movie.

It’s true that Hoover was perversely obsessed with Martin Luther King and that he had the FBI spying on King and many other Civil Rights leaders and activists. But he was perversely obsessed with lots of people and had the FBI spying through every keyhole he could muster agents enough to peep through. And he didn’t need Presidents to tell him to do this. He didn’t need Presidents to tell him to do anything. What he did was do things and then defy Presidents to order him to stop.

The scene between Hoover and Johnson could have been written and played to show this. My point is, though, that the scene shouldn’t have been in there at all. It’s simply more history than the movie can carry and needs to carry.

In order for a scene in which the director of the FBI tells the President of the United States he’s going to blackmail an American citizen with tapes of that citizen having sex with women who are not his wife and the President sits there and says nothing or orders him not to while seriously doubting the order will be obeyed to make sense, there’d have to be a whole lot more of Hoover and his story. And Hoover’s story is part of a much larger story that encompasses the Red Scare, Prohibition, the Cold War, and the Civil Rights Movement. Selma isn’t even trying to tell the whole history of the Civil Rights Movement. It’s focused, to good purpose and effect, on one particular moment in that history. Hoover’s involvement in that moment was tangential. It would have been enough to show that King and his inner circle were aware Hoover and the FBI were working against them. Hoover himself could have been left offscreen and the scene between him and Johnson wouldn’t have been missed.

Of course Johnson knew what Hoover was up to generally and he could have ordered him to cut it out. He could have and should have fired him. So could have and should have every other President from Franklin Roosevelt up to Richard Nixon who did try to get rid of him, although for the wrong reason. But to get down to it at last, Selma would have been a better movie with a better Lyndon Johnson and David Oyelowo’s Martin King would have been better seen as the achievement it is. It’s what I’ve been saying here all along. The historical inaccuracies don’t matter to me as much as the way the script, the directing, and the casting let Oyelowo down.

Had things been otherwise, I think the excellence of Oyelowo’s performance would have been a lot harder to overlook when it came time to make the nominations for the Academy Awards and people wouldn’t be talking now about how Oyelowo was snubbed in not being nominated. We’d be talking a month from now about whether he was snubbed in losing the Oscar to Eddie Redmayne.

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Speaking of Hoover, Dylan Baker is as miscast and misdirected as Hoover as Wilkinson is as Johnson. Baker doesn’t look anything like Hoover but that wouldn’t have been a problem if he’d acted like Hoover. (By the way, to see what I mean by this, watch what Baker does as Robert McNamara in Thirteen Days. For that matter, watch what Bruce Greenwood and Steven Culp do as John and Robert Kennedy.) I had a similar reaction to Tim Roth as George Wallace. There wasn’t a moment when I felt I was looking at the real George Wallace. And I find it odd that a movie built around a realistic portrait of Martin Luther King features three good actors playing Lyndon Johnson, J.Edgar Hoover, and George Wallace as if they were guest stars on The West Wing.

To further confound things, Nigel Thatch appears in a too brief cameo as Malcolm X not just creating a realistic portrait of Malcolm but seeming to have been possessed by him.

Something else. At one point in the pre-production, Lee Daniels was set to direct Selma, which I’m not sure would have been that bad a thing, although I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have been as good as thing has having Ava DuVernay behind the camera, and I mean that more as a compliment to DuVarnay than a criticism of Daniels. But, interestingly, Daniels’ The Butler features a much better and in a real way more realistic Lyndon Johnson. It’s more of a cartoon than a caricature, let alone a realistic portrait, but Liev Schreiber gets at the essential Johnson. He looks like Johnson to a degree more than looking like him without looking like him. Some of that’s make up. Most of it’s Schreiber. He moves like Johnson. He gets the expressions right. And he sounds like Johnson. His dialog is better written too, even though it’s basically comic. In fact, the comedy helps because it conveys the weird attractiveness of Johnson’s madness. Schreiber’s playing a caricature of a caricature but it wouldn’t have taken much adjustment for him to have turned his cartoon of LBJ into a portrait as realistic as Oyelowo’s Martin Luther King and I would have liked to have seen the two of them together. Maybe it’d have come off as too much of a gimmick, but I think Schreiber would have brought the power and passion Wilkinson’s Johnson lacks, and in doing that he’d have helped make Selma an even better movie in several ways including giving Oyelowo someone of equal strength to play off of. He’d have done for Selma at least some of what Tommy Lee Jones did for Lincoln.

Thinking about that, though, imagine what a trip it would have been had Jones been cast as LBJ.

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Final thought: The supporting cast of Lincoln offers Daniel Day-Lewis more challenges than just the ones from Jones, Field, and Strathairn. There’s Jared Harris’ Ulysses Grant, Joseph Gordon-Levitz’s Robert Lincoln, Hal Holbrook’s Preston Blair, Bruce McGill’s Edwin Stanton, and James Spader’s wily political operative W.N. Bilbo. Strong character actors fight to take our attention away from Day-Lewis throughout the film but the first challenge comes in Day-Lewis’ very first scene in which an African American soldier puts Lincoln on the spot concerning the unequal treatment of black federal troops. Lincoln slyly tries to put him off by employing his folksy charm and then he shifts his attention to a couple of white soldiers who are more amenable to being charmed. But the solider won’t let him get away with it. He insists on his presence, throwing Lincoln’s own words in his face by reciting the Gettysburg Address. That soldier is played by…David Oyelowo.

Not a simple matter of impersonation: David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King, Jr. (second from the left, although you probably don’t need me to point that out) with the actors playing members of King’s inner circle---(from left to right) Colman Domingo as Ralph Abernathy, André Holland as Andrew Young, and Stephen James as John Lewis---in Selma. Click on the photo to see the real King with some of the same real men.

Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance as Lincoln in Lincoln was transcendent to a level that no actor, not even one as good as David Oyelowo, playing any character, never mind an historical one, should be expected to match. In fact, I only bring it up because I think Selma’s screenplay was modeled on Lincoln’s and Day-Lewis had some advantages to work with Oyelowo didn’t, mainly due to the scripts they were handed, but starting with the effect of time on the images of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King.

Over the past 150 years, Lincoln has become both more forgotten and better remembered. He’s better known and yet a stranger. Not only is there no one alive who remembers what he was really like. There’s no one alive who can remember anyone who was alive to remember what he was like. But a century and a half’s worth of memoirs, biographies, handed down stories and anecdotes, movies, plays, and television portrayals have combined to create a collective memory of the man. The real Lincoln is a mystery, but the essentially invented Lincoln is as familiar to most Americans and many non-Americans as an old friend. People just feel they know him or at least have a good sense of what he might have been like. And that gave Day-Lewis a solid character to play and play with and play against. And it gave Lincoln’s screenwriter Tony Kushner a character to write for.

Martin Luther King, though, is still well-known in the same way he was known when he was alive: as a public figure. Most people’s sense of what he was really like comes from what they’ve seen on television and read in newspapers, magazines, and grade school and high school history textbooks. They know him as a great orator, as a charismatic political leader, as a secular saint, which is to say, they know him as a distant figure way up there at the head of a crowd. There are many people alive who knew him intimately and could tell us what it was like to be in his company in private moments but many of them are still reticence, worried about preserving his public image, and the recollections of the others haven’t spread into the collective consciousness yet. This gave Oyelowo a too well-defined outer man whose appearance, gestures, expressions, and voice he had to match and very little inner man to re-create. He had to invent the private man and in that he faced the problem of having to do that without violating King’s public memory. Playing the outer man was a simple matter of impersonation. Playing the inner man required tact, discretion, indirection, and reserve. Day-Lewis could play it up. Oyelowo had to play it way, way down.

His challenge was compounded by his not having the lines to say. This was because Selma’s screenwriter Paul Webb had the same problem as Oyelowo in having to portray Martin Luther King without violating King’s public memory but also because he didn’t have the lines to give him. Kushner handled it brilliantly and beautifully but he had something to work with Webb didn’t, his main character’s own words.

Lincoln wasn’t just one of the two best writers who’ve been President---the other being Thomas Jefferson---he’s one of the great writers of American prose. King was a great writer in his own way, but mainly a great writer of speeches. Of course Lincoln was a speech writer too and his writing is mainly known by his speeches. But his style was more idiosyncratic and idiomatic. He was a politician and a lawyer. He crafted his speeches and his public writings with individuals as his audience in mind, individual voters, individual members of a jury. King was a preacher. Most of his writings and speeches are essentially sermons. He was always trying to stir the collective hearts of a crowd or at least the congregation. He was also the leader of a mass political movement and again he was trying to reach and move a crowd. That requires a different, more impersonal rhetorical approach. You can get a sense of what Lincoln might have sounded like when he talked to people one on one to a degree you can’t with King. That makes Lincoln easier to mimic. King’s private speech---and again, this is a consequence of the reticence of people who did talk with him in private---has to be wholly invented and that posed a risk Webb couldn’t take, not for a movie like Selma. It wouldn’t have been right to have played it too safe, but he had to be extra careful. And even if Webb hadn’t had to worry about not offending anyone it’s difficult to make any character sound like a real person talking. The upshot, though, is Kushner had both more material and a freer hand and that gave Day-Lewis more to work with. Day-Lewis had things to say. Oyelowo mostly had things to get across. Pretty much he had to move from speech to speech with interspersed with passages of exposition which were essentially short speeches themselves. He couldn’t talk like Martin Luther King because his King didn’t talk. He orated.

And this is why his portrayal of King was most persuasive and most moving for me when he was silent.

It was the pensive look in his eyes.

You can see it best in the photographs of King. There’s a sadness, a faraway-ness to him that showed up in many of his most glorious moments. He often appears to be somewhere else and that somewhere else is a dark and troublesome place for him. It’s as if he isn’t looking out from the mountaintop at the Promised Land, or even at the still long and difficult trek across the desert ahead, but back at the way he’s come and he’s seeing all his own missteps, hesitations, and changes of direction that took people out of their way instead of leading them forward. It’s the look of a man who knows he’s not the saint people think he is and that he believes he needs to be. It’s the look of someone who is growing increasingly burdened by his role and his mission and who is beginning to look forward to its end.

It’s been said that towards the end King seemed to be developing a death wish. I don’t know. I suspect nobody does for sure. I suspect not even Coretta Scott King knew although she worried about it. But I believe he saw what was coming and while he dreaded it and prayed for that cup to pass from his lip he was trying to resign himself to it.

A problem for democratic societies is they need a thoughtful citizenry to succeed. They need a critical mass of people who think for themselves and, generally, people don’t think for themselves. They don’t think at all. Mostly what they do that they call thinking is feel and remember. They remember what they were told to think when they were kids by their parents, by teachers, by preachers, priests, and rabbis, by other kids, by characters on television. As kids they took all this in and never forgot it and never doubted it. They still accept it without question, without thought, especially when it’s a matter of religion. And the result is that instead of a nation of independent minded adults, we live in a giant Sunday School full of dutiful children.

Update: Saturday afternoon. Welcome to all the folks coming over from Lawyers, Guns & Money. Thank you for looking in and thanks to all who've donated. I'll try to get out individual thank you notes today. Meantime, new posts below.

I haven’t made a secret of the fact I don’t like our governor, Andrew Cuomo. I’m still disappointed I missed my chance to vote against him twice back in the fall.

But the truth is I’m not sorry he won. My vote for the Green Party’s Howie Hawkins wasn’t entirely a protest vote. I want the Green Party to become a viable third party and their candidates need to show they can get votes for that to begin to happen. But my vote for Zephyr Teachout would have been. And I don’t waste my vote on a protest if it’s needed for a win.

I didn’t think about it too deeply at the time because there seemed no doubt she wasn’t going to defeat Andrew, but there were questions about her in my mind: could she win in the general election and if she did would she be an effective governor. My sense was that she might not have and she probably wouldn’t have been. If I thought she was bound to lose the general, I’d have voted for Andrew without a qualm. If I thought she might win but seriously doubted she could run the state and get things, progressive things, that needed doing done, I’d have probably voted for Andrew, no matter how much I liked what she said over some things Andrew did. But like I said, I didn’t worry about it then because I didn’t think I needed to and so I felt free to stick it to Andrew. Or would have if the polling place had been open when I got there.

Andrew Cuomo is nowhere near as liberal as I’d like him to be. I’ve said before, he’s too concerned with the care and feeding of millionaires. He’s a teacher basher. He doesn’t like unions. But George McGovern didn’t like unions either. Something else I’ve said before, the word for a Democrat who isn’t liberal enough isn’t Republican. It’s wrong. Cuomo’s still a Democrat and that makes him liberal enough that voting for him would not have been voting for the lesser of two evils. It would have been voting for Democratic governorship over Republican, an easy choice.

When Republicans want to stir up the faithful, they wave the flag or the bloody shirt. They appeal to resentments. They inflame angers. They identify others to fear and despise. They promise to punish THEM. When Democrats want to do it, they talk about people who need help and how to help them.

“The young girl who sleeps in a homeless shelter tonight is our daughter…The farmer in the Southern Tier who is struggling to make ends meet, that farmer is our brother. The child who lives in poverty in Rochester today is our child.”

Maybe it’s not as elegantly phrased as Mario Cuomo would have done it. But that’s a Democrat talking. Republicans can say things like it, some of them with straight faces and without their tongues snapping off their rollers. Paul Ryan has been trying. Even Mitt Romney is experimenting with sounding compassionate. But they don’t mean it and they always manage to let that show.

Sue me, I believe Andrew means it.

While Andrew’s no Mario, he loved, admired, and respected his old man and he’s still his father’s son.

And even if he doesn’t, we mean it. We Democrats. We liberals. We New Yorkers.

The quote’s from Cuomo’s State of the State address yesterday. Hat tip to Mrs M who read the passage to me this morning with tears in her eyes.

So, pick up truck in front of me, bumper sticker on the gate, that poke-in-the-eye Gadsden flag yellow with two coiled rattlesnakes, one in each bottom corner:

“I’m the Colonial Revolutionary Your Hippie Friends Warn You About”

Common enough mistake. Very human really. Imagining our political enemies see us as we see ourselves and take us as seriously as we take ourselves. My liberal heart bled for the guy. I didn’t see him but the driver had to be a guy. I was hoping he was going where I was going and would pull into the parking lot next to me so I could tell him.

“I’m sorry to have to deliver the bad news, Ethan Allen, but my hippie friends don’t warn me about you. They laugh at you.”

“Do you really expect them not to? Maybe you don’t have a tricorn hat of your own but have you seen your fellow Tea Party types in their fancy dress? They look like Mel Gibson in The Patriot to you? Tim Mison on Sleepy Hollow? You think the sight of middle aged men in knee breeches fills people with awe and respect? Makes them think, you know, they’re just like George Washington, they must be the good guys? Maybe you’re not old enough yourself, but most of your guys were around in the 60s and early 70s and they can tell you how cowed they were by all those college radicals in their Mao jackets. Many of those self-styled revolutionaries were just trying to piss off their parents. Maybe that’s what your guys think they’re doing. Pissing off their grandkids. But those college radicals and you Tea Party types, you’re alike in thinking that putting on a costume changes you. Other people, though, don’t see the change. They see an adult in a costume playing make-believe revolutionary and they either laugh or they feel sorry. Your bumper sticker. It’s a costume.”

He pulled off, headed for a grocery store, and I kept going where I was going, so I was saved from embarrassing myself like that. As if he’d care what I thought of him any more than I care what he thinks of me. That’s another common mistake, thinking we can change someone else’s good opinion of themself. Got beams enough in my own eyes, no business of mine to go around plucking motes.

Ice storm. Hastings woods. Westchester County, New York. Saturday. January 18, 2015. By long time visitor to Mannionville M. George Stevenson who comments on his own photography skills: “Scary what you can do with a phone these days.”

Scenes like this always put me in mind of poems by Robert Frost which is natural since Frost wrote his poems to put readers in mind of scenes like this.

Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day, I paused and said, 'I will turn back from here. No, I will go on farther—and we shall see.' The hard snow held me, save where now and then One foot went through. The view was all in lines Straight up and down of tall slim trees Too much alike to mark or name a place by So as to say for certain I was here Or somewhere else: I was just far from home. A small bird flew before me. He was careful To put a tree between us when he lighted, And say no word to tell me who he was Who was so foolish as to think what he thought. He thought that I was after him for a feather— The white one in his tail; like one who takes Everything said as personal to himself. One flight out sideways would have undeceived him. And then there was a pile of wood for which I forgot him and let his little fear Carry him off the way I might have gone, Without so much as wishing him good-night. He went behind it to make his last stand. It was a cord of maple, cut and split And piled—and measured, four by four by eight. And not another like it could I see. No runner tracks in this year's snow looped near it. And it was older sure than this year's cutting, Or even last year's or the year's before. The wood was gray and the bark warping off it And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle. What held it though on one side was a tree Still growing, and on one a stake and prop, These latter about to fall. I thought that only Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks Could so forget his handiwork on which He spent himself, the labor of his ax, And leave it there far from a useful fireplace To warm the frozen swamp as best it could With the slow smokeless burning of decay.

Of course the people who currently need to see that, like the idiot who drives around town here with the Stars and Bars flying from the bed of his pickup, won’t see Selma. Most of them know what it stands for, anyway. That’s why they like to wave it. But maybe the movie will make it harder for them to lie about it, and maybe coming generations of schoolkids, who will almost certainly be shown the movie by their teachers, will get it.

Photo: Tim Roth as Alabama Governor George Wallace in Selma. Click on the photo to see the real Wallace and the real meaning of the Stars and Bars.

6:33 A.M. Still dark, although the sky is lightening. 19 degrees. Trash pick up day. Maybe it’s my mood or the time of the year but listening to the garbage trucks making their rounds isn’t lifting my spirits the way it usually does. Instead of feeling hopeful and energized by the thought of a new day beginning with work to be done that I’m raring to do, I’m just feeling sorry for the garbage guys and gloomy and anxious on my own behalf about going out in the cold and gray to begin the same old dreary routine. No snow or freezing rain in the forecast at least.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is claiming that there is widespread fraud in the country’s disability system because most people who get benefits merely suffer from anxiety or sore backs.

At a meeting with legislative leaders in Manchester, NH on Wednesday, caught on tape by American Bridge, Paul told the room:

“The thing is that all of these programs, there’s always somebody who’s deserving, everybody in this room knows somebody who’s gaming the system. I tell people that if you look like me and you hop out of your truck, you shouldn’t be getting a disability check. Over half the people on disability are either anxious or their back hurts. Join the club. Who doesn’t get up a little anxious for work every day and their back hurts? Everyone over 40 has a back pain.”

Dear Senator Paul,

Nobody wants to be disabled.

Most people as in almost everybody wants to work.

The number of people on disability who don’t want to work is nothing next to the number of people who want to work but can’t work because they’re disabled!

The number of people on disability who don’t want to work is vanishingly small next to the number of people on disability who want to work but can’t work because employers discriminate against people with disabilities or can’t or won’t afford to make accommodations that would enable them to work.

Everybody is only temporarily abled. At some point in our lives all of us will be disabled to the point of not being able to work. Some of us by injury, some of by illness---including mental illness---all of us by old age. It’s that last disablement that has caused the number of people collecting disability to increase in the last couple of decades. Lots of Baby Boomers have grown too old to do the work their jobs require. Old age is relative. Coal miners, construction workers, farm workers, people who work on their feet all day, people who work with their backs get old sooner than college professors and United States Senators, neither of whom, by the way, work close to a full fifty-two weeks a year or, averaged out, five days a week or eight hours a day, and have any business lecturing people who do put in a full day’s, week’s, and year’s worth of work for very little money, few benefits, and no paid vacation or sick days, and, if you and your fellow Republicans in Congress work your will, no hope of collecting disability if they get injured on the job or get old before their time worn out and worn down by working physically punishing jobs their whole adult lives and develop “back problems” or “anxiety” on their lack of a proper work ethic.

“Back pain”? “A little anxious”? That’s all that’s wrong with them?

I have “back pain”. It has a cause. Spondylolisthesis. You went to medical school. You probably know what that is. Two of my vertebrae are fractured and out of place, pinching the nerves to my legs. There are days I can barely walk. I can’t stand for more the a few minutes at a stretch on even my best days. I’m not on disability. I have a job. I teach college. I can and do work sitting down in a comfortable chair. Days when the pain gets too much for me, if I don’t have to be in class, I can take off. I can spend hours lying flat on my back on the floor. I’m lucky. If I was a construction worker or a coal miner I wouldn’t be able to do this. I wouldn’t be able to work. I’d be out of a job.

A reminder. Not being able to work = DISABLED!

I hear there are a few coal miners in your state.

Ever been down in one of the mines?

Think you could work down in one of those all day with “back pain”?

As for being “a little anxious”? By “a little anxious” do you mean “suffering from a severe and debilitating mental illness like depression”?

Do you even know what depression means? How it afflicts people?

Do you know anything at all about human psychology? For instance, do you know that people who are obsessed with the idea that other people are chiselers and thieves are usually chiselers and thieves themselves? Do you know that the sins and vices we’re most offended by are usually the ones we’re ignoring in ourselves? Do you remember what Jesus said about the mote and the beam?

Apparently, you don’t.

How in God’s name did you earn a medical degree without any understanding or sympathy of and for human beings’ physical and mental frailty?

Meryl Streep should do just one movie next year and she should find the worst script in her agent’s slush pile, team up with Hollywood’s most hacktacular director, ham up her part or phone it in, and then laugh when the Academy nominates her anyway.

Is there a California law that says Streep must be nominated every year no matter what she does or who else is deserving or is it just a county ordinance?

Streep was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for playing the Witch in Into the Woods. Emily Blunt wasn’t nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role for playing the leading role. I’d say the former was predictable and the latter a snub and that both tell you what’s wrong with the Oscar nominations except that I haven’t seen Into the Woods and probably won’t, so what do I know?

I’ll be able to tell you tomorrow afternoon after we’ve seen it what degree of larceny I think was perpetrated against Selma’s director Ava DuVarnay, lleading man David Oyelowo, and screenwriter Paul Webb. My bet is that members of the Academy should be indicted on multiple counts.

I know for certain Ralph Fiennes was robbed, probably for the usual reason: the Academy can’t bring itself to reward a brilliant comic performance, and the nominators for the acting categories are actors who should know better. I’m pretty sure of this, though. Benedict Cumberbatch was nominated in the hope that he’ll find a way to photobomb himself during the ceremony. And I don’t take the Oscars all that seriously anyway but until they start recognizing that sci-fi, fantasy, and superhero movies can be as good and better than any other type of movie I’ll continue to greet every nomination announcement with an amused shrug and a snide, offhand post like this one. Bradley Cooper may be very good in American Sniper---and I’m still on the fence about whether or not I’ll see it---but I doubt he’s as good in it as he was doing the voice for Rocket Raccoon. Doesn’t matter, though, as Eddie Redmayne should be working it out with Stephen Hawking on how they will share duty on Redmayne’s acceptance speech.

I’m in a worse position when it comes to judging the deservingness of the Best Supporting Actor and Actress Award nominees because so far I’ve only seen two of their movies, Wild and The Imitation Game.Laura Dern did a fine job, as you’d expect, but her role was more of an extended cameo. Her part in The Fault in Our Stars was a true supporting role and I wish she’d been nominated for that instead. And as I wrote in my review of The Imitation Game, I’m crazy about Keira Knightley but mostly all she had to do was smile adoringly at Cumberbatch, which of course she did wonderfully. I was far more impressed by her work in Begin Again, a much better movie all around anyway and my favorite summer movie that did not feature a talking raccoon among its leading characters. But as good a film as it was, it’s not the kind of movie that should rack up Oscar nominations. It is the kind of movie that adds to its star’s overall reputation and some day it will be regularly featured in Keira Knightley retrospectives.

Mark Ruffalo retrospectives as well.

As for Best Picture, I’m at a loss again there too. Along with Selma and American Sniper I haven’t seen Birdman,Whiplash, or Boyhood. I don’t have any desire to see Boyhood. Probably unfair of me but from all I’ve heard about it, it sounds like I’d feel about it as I felt about another movie from a couple years ago that critics and certain types of cinephile swore was a work of genius by a genius director and I think that in a couple years it will be as well remembered and as much talked about as The Master.

Of course my real problem in forming an informed opinion on any of the categories is I’m not informed. I just don’t see enough movies in a year to know what and who could have been and should have been nominated instead. As far as it goes, though, the best movies I saw in 2014 included Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy. And in their cases, it’s not so much that I think they were robbed, it’s that they never had a chance of being nominated in the major categories that bugs me.

There is, however, one case where we can all agree that a movie got robbed.

Uncle Merlin has many fine and noble qualities but he also has a cruel streak when it comes to food. Way back when, when he was living in Boston working in the restaurant biz and I was way up north at the boondock college I was longing to transfer to Boston from, subsisting on pizza and the little cafeteria food I could choke down, he used to send me menus from the many fine dining establishments in and around the Hub. He told me he did it to encourage me to make the move, but I knew the truth.

People never change. The other day this turned up in my mailbox. My usual dessert these days is a bowl of oatmeal with a drop of maple syrup. He knows that. Probably he’d say he sent this to encourage me to beat the diabetes, but I know the truth.

I don’t know exactly what these are or where they’re from---petit fours? Some place on Newbury Street, I think.---and I don’t want to know. I’m happy with my oatmeal, thank you.

The first is today’s the first day of my movie reviewing class or, as it’s more portentously known in the college catalog and on my students’ transcripts, Media Criticism in a Wired Culture. This means a new crop of students is about to find out that their mild-mannered professor has a secret online identity as a superblogger and I think it’s only fair that since they’re going to be graded on their writing about movies they should be able to judge whether I’m any good at writing about movies myself.

Also, I’ll be using these three reviews to begin teaching an important lesson, which is: “See how I do this? Don’t do it that way!

“You don’t want to wind up writing reviews that take longer to read than it does to watch the movie.”

As you can probably guess from the title, Harris thinks movie franchises like Marvel’s Avengers series are not good for the future of moviemaking. He doesn’t go as far as saying that the franchises in general, or comic book movies in particular, are the ruin of all that is sacred and holy, but he sees the bare-ruined choirs to come. Regular visitors to Mannionville and particularly readers of my movie reviews can infer that this is not a subject that’s worried me much. I can see Harris’ point and appreciate his concern. Moviemaking has always been about moneymaking but in past many of the people whose job it was to see that money got made cared about the product they were selling as a particular sort of thing. Not art, necessarily (in fact, rarely), but not just as entertainment. They understood that they had to sell a quality product to make money and the quality of their product depended on the art and craft of whole lot of creative people working for them, from directors to stars to cinematographers to production designers to screenwriters and on down to carpenters, electricians, prophandlers, and focus pullers. If Harris is right, and he probably is, the new generation of moneymen and moneywomen think of their product as no different from breakfast cereal, cold medicine, smart phones, or hotel chains. Movies to them are consumer goods people are going to buy some kind of anyway so the trick is simply to make them buy their brand. Quality takes care of itself. What makes the money is successful marketing and the key to successful marketing is branding.

This isn’t likely to end well. I can see it turning movie theaters in to Circuit City and Blockbuster and other retail outlets devoted to and utterly dependent on the consuming of useless toys and crap, businesses done in because their costumers eventually didn’t need any more of the useless toys and crap they offered or, at any rate, didn’t need to buy it at the rate that made the stockholders happy.

And this is worrisome. Not to mention depressing. But it would bother me more and depress me more if at the moment some of the franchise movies, the Marvel comic book movies in particular, weren’t among the very best movies being made.

I don’t mean in comparison. And I don’t mean for what they are. I mean they are among the best directed, best written, best shot, and best acted movies coming to the theaters. Once upon a time, people despaired that every other movie released was a Western. I think someday and soon people will be saying Guardians of the Galaxy and Winter Soldier are, if not The Searchers, then our era’s Red River and High Noon.

“I’m going to die surrounded by the biggest idiots in the galaxy!”: From left, legendary (in his own mind) outlaw Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), vengeance-obsessed rage-aholic Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista), bounty hunter and genetic experiment gone awry Rocket Raccoon (voiced by Bradley Cooper), warrior and assassin Gamora (Zoe Saldana), and sidekick, muscle, and walking houseplant Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), in their first act as a team of heroes-in-the-making, escape from a high-security space prison in a scene full of thrills, chills, spills, and laughter typical of the new Marvel comic book movie, Guardians of the Galaxy.

Guardians of the Galaxy is the most sentimental of the Marvel comic book movies going back to the days before Stan Lee’s first cameo.

Oh, sure, you could say it’s one of the most fun, one of the funniest, one of the most action and thrill packed, a rousing adventure tale, an old-fashioned pirate movie set in space that’s the pirate movie the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie almost was, a better Star Trek movie than either of J.J. Abrams’ reboots, the bestStar Wars movie that isn’t a Star Wars movie (with the added virtue that ancient weapons and hokey religions don’t figure in the fun), a sci-fi Western that will make fans think this was what Buckaroo Banzai and Firefly were leading up to.

You could say all that. Plenty of people have said all that or much of it. Many of you already know all that.

I’m going with sentimental because it’s the critical path less traveled and because it’s true. Guardians of the Galaxy is the most sentimental of Marvel comic book movies because it’s the one with the most real sentiment.

Honesty of emotion isn’t a requirement for a good comic book movie. It’s usually enough just to suggest feelings so that we know our heroes are human and have hearts that are in the right places and the villains aren’t and don’t. The idea is to engage our emotions so that we feel we have a rooting interest in the characters and their fates and aren’t just along for a virtual thrill ride. So directors and screenwriters and actors use tricks to trigger emotional responses. We’re willingly fooled into sympathizing through the manipulation of conventions, tropes, and clichés we’ve been trained by television and movies to respond to with laughter, anger, and tears on cue. And that’s fine. There isn’t time for serious character development in these movies, anyway. We’re not in the theater to see that either. As long as the tricks work, we don’t mind that it’s really us doing the feeling not the characters seeming to come alive on screen.

In a few comic book movies, in the best ones, something more happens. Because of good writing, good directing, and/or good acting, the prime and priming emotions are up on the screen. But it’s usually incidental. It’s not the point and, like I said, it’s not why we bought tickets.

The only exceptions I can think of are Spider-Man 2, which was great, and Iron Man 2, which was…not great.

Peter Parker’s emotional breakdown over his ambivalence about being Spider-Man is just more compelling and affecting than Tony Stark’s emotional breakdown over his ambivalence about being Iron Man, plus there’s the tragedy of Doctor Otto Octavius.

The only exceptions beforeGuardians of the Galaxy.

It’s not just that our heroes’ emotional development isn’t beside the point. It is the point. Guardians of the Galaxy is about our heroes’ developing feelings, towards and about each other and within themselves. Almost everybody with more than four lines, good guys, bad guys, and guys in between, is motivated by bonds of affection. Even the arch-villain Thanos who is indifferent to the wiping out of the populations of entire planets cares about his adopted daughters.

But it’s the developing bonds of affection between the five heroes---anti-heroes---who become known, at least to themselves, as the Guardians of the Galaxy that is at the center of the movie, gives it its heart, and drives the story.

Maybe I should put it this way to make it simple. Guardians of the Galaxy is as much a movie about friendship as Toy Story.

I think the climactic battle may even include a visual quote from Toy Story 3, but you can’t always go by me. I have a habit of reading into things, as you’ve probably noticed.

The reason the movie isn’t trite and hokey and overly-sentimental is the same reason Toy Story isn’t trite and hokey. It’s a well-written, well-directed, well-made, genuinely funny comedy.

All the Marvel comic book movies are funny. They’re full of wisecracks, one-liners, witty repartee, visual gags, and moments of pure slapstick. But most of the humor is an aside to the action. In Guardians of the Galaxy, the humor is often the source or the point of the action. The movie starts out on a somber and, frankly, sentimental note, with a scene guaranteed to make mothers cry, but in the very next scene director James Gunn announces his intentions. From here on out, we’re in it more for the laughs than the tears.

Guardians of the Galaxy is an origin story and origin stories are inherently comic because they are about the arrival of the hero and the hero’s job is to restore order. Things can take a tragic turn later. But for now, things are going to send or at least come to a rest happily. Gunn makes no bones about it. We’re headed for a happy ending. The fun and suspense is how we’re going to get there, what’s going to get in the way the Guardians have to do to overcome the obstacles and keep moving towards that happy ending.

This isn’t to say it’s all sweetness and light.

You can’t have a real comedy without the real possibility of real tragedy. Darkness threatens throughout, and all but one of the Guardians are suffering from heartbreak and loss. As Rocket Raccoon says, trying to brush away a claim on his sympathy along with his own pain and self-pity, “Boo hoo. Everybody’s got dead people!”

Let’s start where the movie starts, with Peter Quill’s dead people. Quill is the main character and eventual leader of the Guardians, the one among our team of heroes for whom the prefix anti- is the least apt. Not inapt. He’s a thief and a pirate, a scoundrel, rogue, and cad who makes Han Solo in the original Star Wars look like a gentleman of principle. But he’s the only one (at first) without murder in his heart and who feels any responsibility towards other living beings. When the job of saving the galaxy falls into his lap, he takes it on with only a token show of reluctance. He comes up with a plan, or “twelve percent of a plan”, and sets to work convincing the others to join him.

Still, he is an outlaw, proud of it, and vain of his reputation as one, a reputation that doesn’t reach as far as he thinks it should. When he announces who he is using the outlaw name he believes his known by across the galaxy, Star-Lord, it usually turns out the people he expects to be cowed by it have never heard it or heard of him. Then they can’t get it right.

His saving grace is his dead people, his mother. (Who and what his missing father is is a mystery that probably won’t be solved until Guardians of the Galaxy 3!) Quill was raised by space pirates who kidnapped him from earth in 1988 when he was a little boy on the night his mother died. He’s been carrying around with him ever since his Walkman and the awesome mix tape---that’s what it says on the label, “awesome mix tape.”--- of her favorite songs from the 1970s and early 80s she made for him and he plays it constantly. It’s the soundtrack of his life and adventures and the voice of his mother imparting her wisdom and goodness, proving that rock and roll is a joyful and moral force, as well as helping to give Guardians of the Galaxya terrific soundtrack of its own.

As played with great good humor and a dancer’s as well as an athlete’s physical grace---he’s got some moves---by Chris Pratt, in the role that will likely make him a star, Quill has a careless charm and a surfer dude’s way too easy-going, take life as it comes languidness that distracts from an intensity of feeling, energy, and intelligence that make him dangerous and immensely attractive. Pratt has a way of looking simultaneously vacant and thoughtful that lets us see why Quill is both good at what he does and easy to underestimate and even forget. It depends at what angle and at what moment you catch him whether you see the laid-back rogue or the focused hero.

The other Guardians are more emotionally twisted and tangled if not as complicated or puzzling.

Gamora (Zoe Saldana) is one of the adopted daughters of the arch-villain Thanos I mentioned earlier. Biologically re-engineered, she’s a trained assassin and soldier of fortune hired out by Thanos, along with her adopted sister Nebula, also an assassin but more formidable, being a cyborg, to the movie’s other arch-villain, Ronan the Accuser played by Lee Pace adding to the rogue’s gallery of hammy villains he began in Lincoln and continued in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, has his dead people, his father and, as he likes to say, his father before him, and he invokes them frequently to justify the grudge he’s holding against an entire planet. Ronan sends Gamora on a mission to retrieve a thing called an infinity stone that will give him the power to indulge his favorite past-time, mass murder, on a galaxy wide scale.

But Gamora, unlike Nebula, has a conscience and a sense of self-worth that’s driving her to rebel against Ronan and Thanos. She has a secret plan to keep the infinity stone for herself and either sell it for a bundle or use it to kill Ronan and Thanos, whichever works out. As it happens, the stone is in the hands of Peter Quill who, of course, doesn’t know what he has is hands on. As far as he knows, it’s just a lumpy metal ball he contracted to steal for someone else, which is to say, to him it’s just a payday, and he’s more than a little surprised when Gamora shows up, ready and eager to kill him if she has to, to take it from him.

Meanwhile, Rocket Raccoon---and by now you’ve probably heard that one of our heroes is a raccoon, a cgi creation with the voice of Bradley Cooper---a bounty hunter with an apparently thoroughly mercenary view of life and a fondness for high-caliber weaponry, has been hired to retrieve Peter Quill. Rocket shows up, along with his only friend who’s also his houseplant slash muscle, a seven foot tall animated tree named Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), at the same time as Gamora, intending to bag and pack Quill for delivery to his employers. This leads to one of the most exciting and funniest scenes in the movie, a round-robin of brawls, captures, and escapes ending with all four of the in the custody of the police who send them straight off to a maximum security prison in space where at this point we can’t help feeling they all, including Quill, belong.

In prison, they meet Drax the Destroyer, hulking elaborately tattooed tower of rage played with an endearing mix of sincerity and literal literal-mindedness by former WWE star Dave Bautista, who will become the fifth member of the team, when they finally get around to admitting they are a team. Drax’s wife and daughter were murdered by Ronan and since then Drax has been aimlessly touring the galaxy inflicting violence on all and sundry as he works out his guilt and grief, psyching himself up for a confrontation with Ronan, in which, alone, he’ll be hopelessly outmatched, which he knows and which explains why he’s taking a long and roundabout route to finding Ronan.

The five conspire to escape from prison together, their teaming up inspired by the fact that Quill’s lumpy metal ball, sold to the right person, will fetch them a fortune that split five ways will still make each of them rich beyond dreaming, and now the real action begins.

And I don’t mean the escape scene, another exciting mix of thrills, spills, chills, and laughs. And I don’t mean the plot that unfolds of trying to sell the ball and then having to stop Ronan and save the galaxy.

I mean the forming of their friendship.

The Avengers treated fans to the teaming up of some favorite superheroes, but in the end that’s all the Avengers are, a team. Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man learn to admire and respect and depend on one another, but they don’t become friends. (Bruce Banner and Tony Stark do, but we don’t find that out for certain until Iron Man 3.) They don’t need to. But the Guardians of the Galaxy can’t exist until they become friends. They can’t do anything good without each other and, as it turns out, they can’t dowithout each other. This is what I mean when I sayGuardians of the Galaxy is a sentimental movie. It’s about the development of feeling, care, sympathy, and understanding between characters who aren’t heroes or aren’t heroes yet. They’re just people trying to cope.

Saldana is dynamic, thoroughly physical, intense, and surprisingly and beguilingly vulnerable as Gamora. Bautista is surprisingly lovable and funny without being at all clowning as Drax. Rocket is a scene-stealing dynamo both as a work of animation and in the work of Cooper who’s clearly having a ball not having to be Bradley Cooper and playing the sort of role it’s unlikely anyone would hire Bradley Cooper to play. Cooper gives Rocket a harsh, angry, old-fashioned movie tough guy with a cream puff of heart voice that I wouldn’t have expected out of him but which I suspect he’s been working on for his own amusement since he was a kid watching cartoons.

But the big surprise and delight is Groot. Diesel makes the most of the few words Groot has at his disposal---as Rocket explains to Quill “he don't know talkin' good like me and you, so his vocabulistics is limited to ‘I’ and ‘am’ and ‘Groot, exclusively in that order.” Quill predicts that that seemingly narrow combination of syllables will wear thin fast but in fact it doesn’t. Not for us, at any rate. Diesel uses those three little words in a variety of wonderfully expressive ways. We may not understand him when he speaks but whenever Rocket translates we know immediately that that’s exactly what Groot said.

The cgi work is just as expressive.

Another thing that makes Guardians of the Galaxy different from previous comic book movies is that it features more fully realized supporting and minor characters. These include John C. Reilly’s unflappably good-natured chief of security on the planet Ronan makes his main target, Glenn Close as the no-nonsense leader of the planet, Karen Gillan as Gamora’s implacable sister Nebula, Christopher Fairbank as a prissy fence known as the Broker, Benecio del Toro as a character I can’t begin to explain, you’ll just have to see him for yourself to get the idea, and the stand-out Michael Rooker as Yondu, the space pirate captain who abducted the young Peter Quill from Earth. Yondu loves Quill as the son he never had. He still has to kill him, understand. Business is business and a pirate captain has to do what a pirate captain has to do. But he loves the guy.

Obviously, I enjoyed the movie. I’ve been asked, though, by somewhat dubious others if they’d like it, considering they haven’t read any of the comics and don’t know the characters and their backstories. My answer is, I did and I didn’t.

Guardians of the Galaxy is the first comic book movie I went into cold without a previous rooting interest in the heroes. The comic didn’t exist when I was a comic book-reading kid and our sons weren’t fans before the movie was in the works.

I knew nothing and don’t feel like I need to know anything more than what the movie told me.

And I think that’s one of the best thing you can say about any movie.

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Guardians of the Galaxy, directed by James Gunn, written by James Gunn and Nicole Perlman. Starring Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, Dave Bautista, John C. Reilly, Lee Pace, Michael Rooker, and Glenn Close. Rated PG-13. Now available on disc and to watch instantly at Amazon.

It comes as the inevitable last big, noisy CGI mess of a battle begins. We see Cap, in extreme long shot, make a running leap off an aerial runway and begin to plummet towards the deck of one of the giant flying death machines about to launch on a mission to wipe out a tenth of the population of the United States. For a second, as he falls, the screen around him fills with shades of battleship gray and Cap is reduced to a speck of bright red, white, and blue.

Lots can be read into that moment, but the main thing to take away is that in the midst of this massive swirl of ambiguity, confusion, and existential threat, there’s Cap being Cap, the goodest of good guys till the end.

And here’s something we know. In addition to trying to stop the agents of Hydra from carrying out their mission of mass murder, Cap intends to confront his new arch-nemesis, the Winter Soldier. What we know is that when he catches up with him, Cap will not snap the bad guy’s neck.

I hope Zack Snyder took a break from filming Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice to go see The Winter Soldier and maybe learn a few things about how to portray the goodest of good guys on screen.

I’m not sure he knows what it means to be good or that he even believes goodness exists.

The makers of Captain America: The Winter Soldier know and believe. The directors, brothers Joe Russo and Anthony Russo, and screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely fill the movie with instances of Cap’s many virtues and you could follow along checking them off on a list: Courage, fidelity, honesty, humility, generosity, self-denial, self-effacement, selflessness, faith, hope, charity, mercy, forbearance, all the cardinal virtues including purity or, if you will, chastity, which does not mean celibacy---We don’t know if Steve Rogers is a virgin. The movie’s humorously coy about that. We do know that he’s devoted to the woman he still calls his best girl, Agent Peggy Carter, even though she kept aging after he fell into the ice in 1945 and was quick-frozen for the next seventy years and is now ninety years old and, apparently, in hospice care. But even though his faithfulness to Peggy is now purely chivalric and he’s about to lose her for good this time, he’s still impervious (although not oblivious) to the seductive charms of Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow.

But the Russos never stop the narrative in its tracks for scenes of Cap demonstrating his virtuousness and Markus and McFeely haven’t clogged up their dialog with mini-sermons on what makes Cap Cap. They trust us to pick up on that, or, actually, take it for a given, as the story moves along. And in addition to trusting us, they trust someone else.

Their leading man.

Chris Evans carries it off with grace, wit, intelligence, modesty, charm, and----this is very important---conviction. Also, and also very important, a sense of humor.

As I’ve said in previous posts, Evans is an honors graduate of the Christopher Reeve School of How to Play a Superhero.

Before I take this further and risk turning this review into a sermon itself, let me stop here to praise Captain America: The Winter Soldier as a superheroic feat of moviemaking.

Of course, it’s a superhero movie. A very good superhero movie. One of the four best since the first X-Men made the genre as respectable as other genres like Westerns, War Movies, Romantic Comedies, and Spy thrillers. But very good genre movies tend to be very good movies never mind their genre and to have as much in common with other very good movies never mind their genres as with others of their own kind. The Winter Soldier is a terrific superhero movie, but it’s also a terrific spy thriller in the manner of the best Bonds, particularly Skyfall,which was a genre-bender in its own right. And while Skyfall referenced more realistic spy thrillers like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,The Winter Soldier pays homage to Three Days of the Condor, which I’ll bet Evans’ co-star Robert Redford noticed and appreciated.

And, as with X-Men: Days of Future Past, when The Winter Soldier is in traditional Spy Thriller-mode, it almost doesn’t matter that the heroes have superpowers. Throughout the whole middle act, Cap might as well be Bond, considering what the plot has him doing, with Black Widow as his more heavily-armed and more gymnastic Pussy Galore. The differences are that where Bond takes on five guys, Cap can take on twenty, and when Bond punches someone they fly ten feet and when Cap does they fly thirty.

Our story so far: Since the Battle of New York that was the center of The Avengers, Steve Rogers has been working as an agent for the no-longer ultra-secret super counterintelligence-counterterrorism organization S.H.I.E.L.D. but he’s not enjoying the work. As he says himself, he’s a soldier not a spy. But he’s a special breed of soldier, and I don’t mean a super-soldier. He’s a typical soldier of World War II which makes him a citizen soldier. He’s a volunteer who fights for principles. He’s missed the Cold War, Vietnam, Watergate, the beginnings of the War on Terror and so he sees things in terms of right and wrong, not us against them. He wants to know---needs to know---that what he’s doing is right, but nothing his boss, S.H.I.E.L.D’s awesome but enigmatic and somewhat sinister director Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) is willing to tell him reassures him. Just the opposite in fact.

There’s a reason Fury’s so evasive, though. It turns out that remnants of Hydra, the Nazi army within the Nazi army that was potentially even more dangerous than the regular Nazis and that Cap defeated when he made what he thought at the time was the ultimate sacrifice at the end ofCaptain America: The First Avenger. While Cap was frozen, Hydra regrouped and, slowly, over the course of two generations, they infiltrated S.H.I.E.L.D to the point where they are now in the position to take over and use S.H.I.E.L.D’s own weapons and resources to wage apocalyptic war on the entire United States. Once they’ve defeated the U.S, they intend to move on to dominating the whole world. Fury has discovered Hydra’s plan but before he can decide if he can truly trust the very few people he’s inclined to trust, Cap being one of them, and enlist them to help him thwart Hydra, Hydra sends their deadliest assassin, the Winter Soldier, to eliminate him. Cap, to whom Fury was only able to divulge a part of the plan, becomes Hydra’s next target, and the chase is on.

Cap, with the help of the only two people he knows he can trust, Black Widow, whose loyalty is without question because it turns out to have been wholly to Fury and not S.H.I.E.L.D itself, and an outsider, a veteran of Afghanistan named Sam Wilson, soon and almost accidentally to be known as the flying superhero the Falcon, sets out on the run to figure out the whole of Hydra’s scheme and how to stop it while eluding, outwitting, and out-fighting Hydra’s army of hitmen, including the Winter Soldier.

Like I said, a Bond movie with those differences I mentioned, plus one more. Bond is essentially a loner. Cap likes company. He believes in having company as a virtue. Captain America is a teamplayer and a team leader. But, at heart, he’s a teammate. That is, he’s a friend.

You might remember which other goodest of good guys identifies himself as “a friend.”

I mentioned how the Russos and their screenwriters don’t take The Winter Soldieroff-track for scenes only there to play up Cap’s virtues. But they do send it on a little side trip for a scene in which Cap---Steve Rogers, actually---makes a bedside visit to Peggy (Hayley Atwell in old-age make-up reprising her role fromThe First Avenger) in her hospital room. Many of Steve’s softer virtues are on display. He’s kind, tender, solicitous, chivalrous, and tactful---he’s aware of what’s past and what can never be and of the differences that separate them and will soon separate them forever, but he’s careful not to say anything to call attention to those sad truths.

It’s a touching scene, but more so because of what she does.

Peggy brings up their ages---well, her aging---and he failing health as a prelude to letting him know she understands what he’s going through and that she’s worried about him. She assures him that, although it nearly killed her when she thought he’d died, she went on to have a good life. She was happy. What bothers her, she tells him, is that he wasn’t able to have his life. Which at first might seem like a strange thing to say to someone who is physically twenty-eight years old and thanks to his super-resiliency to injury and illness might live another one hundred and fifty. He has several lifetimes ahead of him. Plenty of time to have a life.

But not that life.

What she’s saying is that the life he was on the way to having was interrupted in a way that made it impossible to re-continue as he’d planned. His hopes and dreams and expectations---including marrying his “best girl” and starting a family with her---will never be realized because everyone he needed to share that life and help bring it about is gone or is too old and about to be gone. He’s alone, is what she means, and lonely. And he’s about to become even lonelier, and her heart aches for him because she knows how sad that makes him.

It’s a question filmmakers, TV producers, and the creators of comic books have been asking themselves since they collectively realized the real money wasn’t in marketing superheroes to kids: How do you make superheroes into “realistic” characters adults can identify with?

The answer has been, generally, to burden them with emotionally crippling backstories to which they react tragically by acting-out their angst, self-pity, rage, or all three.

A better answer is to have them react to the plot and other characters with a wide-variety of ordinary and natural emotions and let good actors act them out.

Steve Rogers has a tragic backstory but it doesn’t fill him with angst, self-pity, or rage. One of his virtues is an emotional resiliency that matches his physical resilience. He knows bad things happen to everyone, and worse and much worse to many, so he deals and he copes and he carries on. In short, he’s a grown-up about it. But he misses his family and friends and he is lonely and that does make him sad. Realistically sad.

And among Chris Evans’ virtues as an actor is an ability to make Steve Rogers’ sadness felt throughout without letting it drown his natural ebullience, optimism, and good-humor. Peggy’s worries are well-founded. But Steve---Captain America---is still a man capable of joy.

Still, this is a problem for someone who makes virtues of having company and being a friend. Captain America believes no one should go it alone or can go it alone, not even a superhero, and here he is, alone.

And this is another way The Winter Soldier isn’t just a superhero movie or why it almost doesn’t matter that the main characters have superpowers. An important part of the story is resolving Cap’s problem and so one of its themes is the nature of friendship.

The story presents Cap with two potential friends, Sam Wilson, soon to be known as the Falcon and S.H.I.E.L.D.’s top field agent and assassin Natasha Romanoff, known for good reason as the Black Widow.

Wilson is easy. He and Cap share a common background as returning combat veterans having trouble fitting back into civilian life. But as smoothly underplayed by Anthony Mackie, Wilson is no pushover. He admires Cap but he’s not awestruck. He knows is own strengths and he’s confident of his ability to work with Cap as the Falcon. But he’s also confident that he can be a real help to him as a friend. He knows what Cap needs from him and he gives it without a thought.

Things between Cap and Black Widow (Johansson) are more complicated. Their shared background is as agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., work that doesn’t make Cap especially happy. And Cap doesn’t think of her as real friend material and nothing she says or does through the first half of the movie inclines him to change his mind. He’s not hostile. Just wary. And this is her problem.

She’s not ideal friend material, for one thing, being a stone-cold killer by training and a loner by necessity, habit, and temperament. She doesn’t know how to go about being a real friend, generally, but she’s at a serious loss with Cap. She can’t figure out how to get around his formidable good guy-ness---that’s part of her problem. She sees his essential nature as something to get around. Her approach to him is the same as her approach to any mark she has to deal with in the spy game. She tries to manipulate him. She messes with him. Every chance she gets. Every way she can think of. Which doesn’t work at all, and that confuses her no end. More baffling, though, is she’s learning from watching him that she didn’t know what it means and what it takes to be a good guy. She’d thought all it took in her case was to switch sides from killing for the Russians to killing for Nick Fury (to whom she’s more loyal than she is to S.H.I.E.L.D. Actually, for her Fury is S.H.I.E.L.D.). Being around Cap is making her aware of something she didn’t know or care she had, a conscience. A guilty conscience.

To her surprise and consternation, she realizes she needs Cap not just to like her and want her as a friend but to absolve her.

Ok, I’m rambling my way back into a sermon.

Listen.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a terrific action-adventure movie with a witty and intelligent script full of snappy dialogue, a story that offers real suspense (if not all that much of a mystery) and puts matters of real and realistic importance at risk, and well-choreographed fight and chase scenes that don’t turn into extended ads for the video game but have tension, energy, excitement, and payoffs of their own while moving the plot along. The supporting cast is fine and the leading man is attractive, interesting, sympathetic, and real, not to mention one of the most frightening movie villains since Odd-Job.

I had to get Bond back in here somehow. But trust me. The Winter Soldier is scary. Not going to tell you who plays him because that might be a spoiler but even though he has virtually no lines and half his face is covered through more than half the movie, just with his glare and his body language commands the screen every second he’s on it.

I think I’ve made it clear I’m pretty high on Evans. Mackie and Johansson are fine too. Samuel L. Jackson is Samuel L. Jackson and it says something about the movie, the moviemakers, and Jackson himself that one of the most exciting action sequences features not Cap on his own but Fury on his own and the best and most exciting special effect in the sequence is Jackson himself.

Robert Redford as Fury’s boss, Alexander Pierce, does a good job of doing what he’s in the movie to do, make us forget why Robert Redford is playing this part. Frank Grillo makes a compelling and charismatically dangerous double-agent. Maximilliano Hernandez makes a compellingly cowardly one. Toby Jones returns for an amusing, creepy, and perhaps too clever cameo as the evil but cowardly mad scientist from Captain America: The First Avenger, Dr Arnim Zola, who has discovered his own way of outliving all his old friends, if he had any, and enemies. Garry Shandling shows up too, crossing over from Iron Man 2 for a cameo as the smarmy Senator Stern whose dislike of Tony Stark turns out to have something more to it than his inability to tolerate a wiseass. And Stan Lee rides again in what I think is his best cameo yet. Yep. Even better than the one inThe Amazing Spider-Man. Nuff said.

To get back to what I said about one of the themes of The Winter Soldier being the nature of friendship, presumably that’s something that will feature in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, since it’s centered on the world’s finest friendship. InThe Winter Soldier Cap begins to make new friends, but here’s the thing. They’re going to be friends of Captain America not of Steve Rogers, because, basically, Steve Rogers does not exist in 2014. There’s just no place for him and he has yet to make one for himself. Consequently, he has no life of his own apart from being Captain America.

That other goodest of good guys, however, has a life apart from being Superman. In fact, his life is apart from being Superman. Being Superman is just his job and whenever he wants he can put it aside to live his life as Clark Kent.

The Winter Soldier sets things up for The Avengers: Age of Ultron and Captain America 3 to continue to deal with the sadness and loneliness that are at the center of Cap’s character.

Superman---Clark Kent---isn’t sad, isn’t lonely. He is that hardest of all characters to portray. The happy, well-adjusted hero.

Watching Captain America: The Winter Soldier won’t help Zack Snyder with that. He’ll have to figure out how to deal with it on his own.

Once and future friends and and once and future enemies Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender) and Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) re-establish their old rivalry while a character conspicuously not called Quicksilver (Evan Peters) waits for them to notice his handiwork with a roll of duct tape in the, never mind best X-Men movie, very good superhero movie X-Men: Days of Future Past.

X-Men: Days of Future Past includes a slow motion action scene set in the Pentagon kitchen that’s one of the most thrilling and funny set-pieces yet filmed for a superhero movie.

It also includes one of the best ads for duct tape ever.

Both star supporting player Evan Peters as second-tier X-Man Quicksilver, who almost runs away with the movie.

Evans’ Quicksilver isn’t called Quicksilver, though, and he’s not to be taken as the same Quicksilver who’ll be a character in The Avengers 2: Age of Utron, except that he is.

Don’t worry about it. It’s business.

The thing to worry about---or I should say the thing I wish director Bryan Singer had worried more about---is that after the scene in the kitchen Quicksilver vanishes from the movie in a flash and with him goes most of the inventiveness and humor that up till that point had Days of Future Past on its way to being better than Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which means on its way to being one of the very best superhero movies yet filmed.

After Quicksilver’s speedy exit, Days of Future Past settles down into a routine chase movie, with the narrative trajectory and hitting the same sort of plot points as any and every Daniel Craig as Bond-Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne-inspired action-adventure. The fights and stunts are designed to make use of the fact that the characters have superpowers, but the point is they don’t have to have those powers for the story to work. In a more realistic sort of thriller (more realistic as in more bound by the laws of physics and biology), Jennifer Lawrence’s Mystique would be a quick change artist instead of a shapeshifter and the bad guys she kicked, punched, flipped, threw, and karate chopped would go flying only ten feet or so and not thirty; otherwise she would go about her business without any other changes in her part in the plot.

And our trio of heroes, James McAvoy’s Charles Xavier, Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, and Nicholas Hoult’s Beast, don’t need their superpowers for most of what they do in their attempts to hunt Mystique down and stop her before she accidentally brings about the end of the world. They’re like the teams from Mission:Impossible, Burn Notice, Red, The Seven Samurai, any number of Westerns and heist movies, or, as it happens, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, in which Cap, Black Widow, and Falcon get done a lot of what they get done without needing their superpowers. (Technically, Black Widow and Falcon don’t even have superpowers.)

This is not a bad thing. It’s a good thing. The less a superhero movie is about the characters having superpowers and displaying them and the more it’s about the heroes (and villains) having to think and feel their way through their adventures and perils like heroes and villains in those more realistic action-adventures, the better it is as a movie, let alone a superhero movie.

That’s what I liked about X-Men: First Class. It wasn’t as much about the forming of a team of superheroes (and a team of supervillains) as it was about the formation and dissolution of a friendship between two extraordinarily talented and intelligent and principled men who happened to have superpowers.

(I was about to call First Class a reboot of the X-Men franchise, but Days of Future Past makes the word “reboot” an iffy call now.)

And what I really like about Days of Future Past is that it continues that story by showing how one of those men, the better but far more damaged of the two, gets over the heartbreak and self-pity that have crippled him emotionally (Ironically, he’s been “cured” of his actual physical crippling.) since the loss of that friendship by strengthening another old friendship and forging a new one with two other extraordinarily talented and principled men and how with their help he’s able to attempt to save the world from the Sentinels and in the process the lives and the souls of the two people he loves most, despite their not being worthy of his love.

Unfortunately, come the movie’s third act, Singer feels compelled to turn Days of Future Past into a more standard superhero movie and this means making a big, noisy mess in extended scenes of wanton destruction on a massive scale, with screaming crowds running back and forth across the screen wily-nily as debris rains down on them and things explode around them and an over-reliance on CGI.

This happens in Captain America: The Winter Soldier too. The difference is that the final battle grows out of the story, it’s not there just for convention’s sake, it’s set up throughout the course of the movie and unfolds exactly as it’s supposed to because Cap has a plan he shares with the audience before things turn messy and noisy, so we know where the fight scenes are headed.

And directors Joe and Anthony Russo let Cap, Falcon, Black Widow, and the Winter Soldier lead us through their sequences in the big battle. Singer loses track of his main characters in the mayhem, giving us nothing to focus on in the mess and no sense this is taking the story anywhere, like, for instance, a climax.

It feels like it’s just going to go on and on.

It doesn’t, of course. And the movie isn’t ruined. It’s a let down, but Singer puts things right in the end.

And if he lets the big moments crash and bang to little purpose, Days of Future Past is filled with small touches, grace notes, subtle moments of humor, poignancy, and delightful surprise that reveal character, twist the plot, defy our expectations, and deepen the story while moving it forward in ways that keep things fun and, well, real.

The scene in the Pentagon kitchen is one beautiful small touch after another.

Quick plot summary: Sometime in the near future (the present being around whenever we’ve been left at the end of X-Men: Last Stand), an army of quasi-intelligent, nearly invincible giant robots called the Sentinels are waging an apocalyptic war against mutants and all humans who are their allies. Most of the X-Men have been wiped out. The last surviving X-Men, who include old favorites Professor X, Magneto, Wolverine, Storm, Shadowcat, Iceman, and Colossus (guest stars Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellan, Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Ellen Page, Shawn Ashmore, and Daniel Cudmore) and some awesome newcomers to the movie franchise, Bishop, Blink, Sunspot, and Warpath (Omar Sy, Bingbing Fan, Adan Canto, and Booboo Stewart) have holed up in a temple in the Himalayas to make a final, forlorn stand.

But before the Sentinels arrive, they figure out that if Shadowcat can use a power I didn’t know she had to transport one of their number mentally back in time to the moment when the Sentinels were created, where with the help of Professor X’s younger self and any of the original X-Men who can be rounded up, they can prevent the mad scientist who invented the Sentinels from obtaining the knowledge and material he needed to invent them.

That moment was in 1973 and the X-Man chosen to make the trip back in time is Wolverine---Logan---because A. he was alive then and can occupy his own younger body and B. he’s played by Hugh Jackman and it’s Jackman as Wolverine that most of the audience is there to see.

Logan’s first task is to track down the forty year old Charles Xavier and convince him he’s there to transmit a distress signal from forty or so years in the future, a job slightly complicated by the fact that in 1973 Logan and Xavier hadn’t yet met and become friends and Xavier might not swallow a time-travel story from a grouchy stranger with weird hair and anger-management issues. The bigger complication is that Charles is an emotional wreck. Not only has he given up his great powers, he’s given up on the idea that those powers can be used to do the world good. His heart is still in the right place but he’s lost the will and his faith in human- and mutant-kind and in himself. It’s up to Logan to snap him out of it, and as Wolverine fans know, dealing with the softer emotions is not Logan’s strong suit.

This puts the focus equally on McAvoy’s Charles Xavier as on Jackman, but Jackman does something I don’t think he’s had to do in any of his previous movies, relegate himself to playing second fiddle. This is Charles’ story and Logan is its witness. Jackman keeps himself reined in, even in his scenes apart from McAvoy. He’s on the lookout as opposed to on the prowl, having exchanged Logan’s usual wariness for a watchfulness that reminds us that this is not abouthim.

McAvoy continues to do what he started in First Class, take the character of Charles Xavier away from Patrick Stewart the way Ewan McGregor took Obi-wan away from Alec Guinness. In my review of First Class (The superhero as the only adult in the room) I said that McAvoy wisely doesn’t try to play a young Patrick Stewart because Patrick Stewart was never young. What he’s succeeded in doing, though, is giving Xavier a young self that can be read into Stewart’s old Professor X. I would bet that Stewart, canny and knowing and generous as he is, is aware he’s now playing an old James McAvoy and has adjusted accordingly. In the one scene they have together, Stewart is clearly laying back to let McAvoy define their relative roles and we see McAvoy’s Charles as the real Professor X and Stewart as his shadow.

X-Men: First Class was more Magneto’s story than Xavier’s which made it more Michael Fassbender’s movie than McAvoy’s. Singer has maybe overcompensated this time out, underusing Fassbender to the point that he might as well not be in there and Magneto’s whole part handled by stunt doubles and CGI, which, I’m pretty sure, is often the case. And Jennifer Lawrence doesn’t have much to do as Mystique except look sly before a shapeshift and smug afterwards. But she carries off her various 1970s fashion ensembles well and in fact looks more authentically 70s than she did in American Hustle.That’s possibly due to the lighting or, rather, to Days of Future Past being lit. American Hustle is mostly shadowed. It’s hard to remember, but the sun did shine sometimes between 1970 and 1980. Nixon didn’t cover up the sun, and Reagan didn’t bring it back out.

Speaking of Nixon, he’s a character in Days of Future Past. That’s not a warning, just a fact. He’s a character. Not a statement. Not an irony. Not a joke. Not a political comment. He’s simply President Nixon, temporarily distracted from Watergate and achieving “Peace With Honor” in Vietnam by the sudden and unexpected threat posed by giant robots and mutants with superpowers. While Mark Camacho does a good job of playing Nixon as a character out of a comic book, as opposed to out of a Herblock cartoon (although he’s a bit stocky for the part), the best thing about his being in there is another one of Singer’s grace notes---an explanation for the 18 1/2 minute gap in the tapes.

As the young Hank McCoy, Nicholas Hoult is suitably insecure and even unnerved in the face of his own mutant powers, suggesting Hank’s future lusty embrace of his great intellect, ferocious strength, and luxurious blue hairiness as the X-Man known as the Beast by his chagrined resistance to all that. Peter Dinklage embues Bolivar Trask, the creator of the Sentinels, with the most frightening form of madness, complete sanity. And, as suggested up top, Evan Peters is a joy to watch as Quicksilver when he slows down long enough to let us catch sight of him.

I was never of a fan of the X-Men when I was comic book-reading kid and the first three movies left me cold. So I’ll leave it to fans to sort out how Days of Future Past fits in with the books and the other movies and how it revises and alters the continuities. It looked to me that it takes us up to the beginning of the original trilogy, which would mean, unfortunately, that X-Men: Last Stand is still part of the timeline. But then so is The Wolverine, which takes up where Last Stand left off. So that’s good. But Oliver Mannion says that it erases all of the first three and he has a list of clues, which I won’t repeat because they amount to spoilers, that support that conclusion.

He may be right.

But know what?

I don’t care.

X-Men: Days of Future Past is now the best X-Men movie. But that doesn’t matter. Days of Future Past, like First Class, is enjoyable for its own sake. You don’t need to have seen the other movies or even know they exist to get into them. It’s a good superhero movie, a very good superhero movie, falling just short of Captain America: The Winter Soldier on my list. (For the record, the best areIron Man, Spider-Man 2, Batman Begins, and The Winter Soldier with Supermanand Superman II occupying a special pride of place.) And here’s the thing about very good superhero movies.

They’re like very good westerns and very good war movies and very good thrillers and very good romantic comedies.

Genre doesn’t signify.

They’re just good movies.

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Logan has gone through plenty of hard times and rough patches in his long life---World War II, for example, was no picnic for him. See The Wolverine. I mean it. SEE The Wolverine.---but the 70s don’t seem to have been particularly miserable for him. Mostly he seems to have forgotten them. Still, this isn’t a nostalgia trip for him. Returning to what Doonesbury eulogized as that “kidney stone of a decade” is a series of reminders of irritations and annoyances, which sets up one of my favorites of Singer’s grace notes.

Coming out of the cheap hotel where he’s just awakened inside his 1970s self and in bed with a gangster’s girlfriend, Logan tries to pick out from among the many cars lining the street the ride he’s “borrowed” from a thug who no longer needs it by pointing the keys and pushing the button he immediately realizes isn’t there because remote-controlled door locks haven’t been invented yet. He looks momentarily annoyed, making a note to himself why he doesn’t miss these particular good old days, then does an instantaneous bit of detective work worthy of another perpetually angry comic book hero.